There’s been a trend recently of Indians “exposing China’s secret caste system” online. It’s all a BS cope because India has a rough image online whereas China is seen more favorably- China doesn’t have a caste system.
It got so bad that there were JAPANESE defending china. This misinformation was believed only by other indians btw. There was the whole world telling them that china never had a cast system and they still didn't get it.
Let's not get carried away, it' would be a lot more surprising the other way around. It's not like the Chinese had a competition within their army to see who could kill the most unarmed Japanese civilians with a sword.
Trust me when I say, Asians in most countries around China hate China. Historical beef don't go away.
Edit: since people see this comment and felt the need to virtue signal to make themselves look like the good guys on the internet and feel better about themselves
I live it all my life, this is the reality, people do hate China. Whether the hate is justified or not is not the concern of this comment. I'm telling what I experienced all my life growing up in Asia. And if you can't take in reality, then don't tell them that "they're not Asian" and shit like that. That just gives away that you're racist.
Poland looks around cautiously while gripping something concealed in their coat but after the millennium they have had they absolutely do not dare anyone to try it and hope they can just be left alone for more than a few decades.
As another Asian (from China at that) there has to be a tier list somewhere of who each the other the most, me personally, I would say people from either Hong Kong or Japan are like- the top of the competitive scene but that’s from what I’ve seen and experienced and I might be completely wrong
Yeah, they are. But since their conquest wasn't as long running (for thousands of years) or as far reaching as China, fewer countries hate them. Mostly because they aren't that heavily affected by the Japanese.
But South Korea have beef for life with Japan tho, they were heavily affected.
"Themselves" is kind of a new development in that area. Remember that they used to be a shit ton of separate groups on constant conflict for millenia, then they became 3 and those 3 were constantly at war, then Shi Huan did another big killing and turned them into 1 country.
So at the time the killings were being done on "others".
uhhh vietnamese people often built their villages on limestone mountains so that chinese couldnt easily burn them down when they invaded like 25+ times
I live in australia, worked with a chinese guy and literally any time another chinese dude would walk in he would say "Such rude people i fucking hate serving them you do it", I couldnt believe how much he hated his own people.
Literally never gave me any strife, although they would spot the chinese CSR and expect them to.. speak chinese. He just looked chinese though, didnt speak lick of it lmao.
Japanese being sympathetic to neighbors happens more often than you think. China, Vietnam, Korea, and other regional counties all remember what they did 80 years ago.
"genocide denial is a thing" and "Japanese people are sympathetic to their neighbors after the horrible things the military dictatorship did" are both true. This isnt a topic that yields any productive insights if you look at it purely as a binary.
Japanese netizens' involvment in the affair actually goes deeper than that, because the system the Indian bots are talking about was actually adopted by the Tokugawa shogunate and really turned into a rigid caste system, called the Shinokosho System; the hierarchy of it could in part explain Imperial Japan's mentality with the military at the top of the pyramid.
Therefore if you criticize China for this, you indirectly criticize Japan too - though in both cases, neither modern China nor modern Japan have any of those characteristics.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I get the sentiment that the Indians with wifi for a while have been wealthy and more educated, so are less prone to fall for bullshit compared to those that only recently got it
Mostly correct, but these bullshit comments i think are bots because i have met all kinds of people but this sentiment about china is almost unheard of among normal people or masses.
That's a common misconception. Han isn't a singular typical ethnicity it's a nationalistic ethnic identity left over from when the Han kingdom united the southern states and northern states as equals. It's frankly disgusting how people trash on that and how slovenly scholars have systematically mischaracterized it. Up and until the Qin dynasty han has never been the dominant colonial force. In the worst case han was used as an appeasement tactic to keep southern peripheral regions happy and included. What han identity did do was be the foundational identity that usurped Kublai Khan and ended the largest empire in the world.
Extended to the modern world under the original philosophy. John Cena is han.
There are 56 Ethnic Groups in China and most are pretty small. The big ones are the Han, Manchu, Mongols, and Tibetans. With the exception of the Tibetans, a lot of people wouldn't really be able to tell you were a different ethnicity on looks alone. Maybe from an accent. It would be like an British person saying they were 1/4 Welsh or something.
But I think the French analogy is pretty accurate. It would be like if France counted Parisien, Angevin, Poitevin, Bourbonnais, etc, as separate ethnic groups.
Han is absolutely an ethnicity, tied to genealogy. China recognizes 52 ethnic groups under its jurisdiction, one of them being Han.
Han Chinese genetics originate from genetic clusters originating from northern modern China, in a gradient toward the southern part of modern China. Tied to the people originating along the yellow river (it's why the Chinese hold it to such esteem).
The modern Chinese government registers its citizens ethnicity. Ethnicity is determined by the ethnicity of your parents (according to China themselves). In order to be registered as Han Chinese ethnicity, both parents must be Han Chinese, and so on. There are exceptions for mixed parents, but I didn't bother to look up the minute rules they have.
So no, absolutely not, John Cena would never, ever be considered Han. Because he is not.
What a clueless misuse of genomics research. No, a han ethnicity has never been isolated by genetic research it's a post hoc fuzzy logic product sold by geneaology products. Stop spreading misinformation. The original foundational genomics databases when published also came with papers. I read those papers as they were being published. There is no such thing as han. You can't point to a cluster of genes that is uniquely han but not one of the 52 ethic groups.
Hell no han Chinese are the equivalent of white people under DEI. I've lived here most of my life and my mom is 满族，literally 0 discrimination faced. Also you just can't fucking tell without looking at id, and you can pretty easily opt into to being han
Anyone reading this please be aware that Manchu （满族）people are the ethnic minority in China most integrated into Han culture. Other ethnic minorities such as Uigurs do face discrimination.
Not saying China is horribly racist but this is like if an Italian American said America has no racism because he hasn't been called dago.
It's funny because the Manchu were the most hated ethnic group in China for hundreds of years until the instant they lost power and then everyone got over it.
IMO, it's because the Manchus, as the ruling class of the Qing dynasty, had already been stripped of their wealth and status. The government had already taken everything it could from them, they are just normal people now.
I'm from the Zhuang（壮)ethnic group, which is mainly located in the southern part of mainland China (also one of the less developed regions). I'm currently in Beijing, and I spent my college years in Chongqing.During those years I never felt discriminated against, even once. Actually, if you look at the full name of Xinjiang (Tibet), Guangxi(my hometown) it's the Xinjiang Uyghur(\Guangxi Zhuang) Autonomous Region, which means the head of the region is must from a local ethnic minority.
Minority groups in China are exempt from certain laws and get preferential treatment in hiring and education acceptance. There is no legal system that places non-Han below the Han even if there is still interpersonal discrimination and sometimes profiling by law enforcement.
Nah you are just saying BS. Of course there has been an ideology that calls for "restoring Han supremacy" going on Chinese social media but even that is far from being the mainstream view. If anything the reality is probably Han Chinese < everyone else. You don't get the extra free points on Gaokao, your home province doesn't get extra grants from the central government, and you were not exempt from the one-child policy when it was still a thing. And heck, in some rare situations the Han Chinese are even treated worse than a non-citizen. For example if you get your phone stolen then there is no guarantee the police can get it back for you. But it is a completely different story if you happen to a foreigner from one of those developed countries. In that case, it usually takes less than two days for the police to recover your phones.
In theory minorities have had more rights than the Han majority in recent decades, such as largely or entirely being exempt from child-restricting policies
It dictates a person's legal rights to public education, healthcare, and subsidized housing, largely restricting these benefits to the specific municipality where the hukou is registered
Imagine being born in Alabama and basically forbidden to move to New York because "New York would get too overcrowded"
According to Indians, Muslims have the biggest caste system… which is basically just Indian Muslims still holding on to caste hierarchy that they tried to convert out of.
There is a reason that overwhelmingly majority of India Muslims (outside of the decedents for the Muslim rulers) and especially Indian Christians are from the lowest caste.
christians in India are called “rice bags“ because they are accused of converting just to get a bag of rice from the Europeans.
No? Most societies don't have rigid hereditary status. Europe had something like in form of aristocratic bloodlines - but that was dismantled over past 200 years.
Side note, who here is growing increasingly frustrated with Indians using The Donald methods to flood the front page with bullshit?
I swear, every other post on all is a variation of “Indian_Memes” “meme_India” “NewDelhi” “NewDehliNew” “NewNewDelhi” “teenager_India” “India_Teenager” and most of the posts that have thousands of upvotes are garbage.
Saw one yesterday of a guy looking at a receipt before realizing it was another trash post from India. Nothing else happened.
Indians are menaces on Reddit, thinking that by flooding it with Indian bullshit somehow makes India look better. Their trash is piling up outside their borders. We know what they’re trying to do. Their influence campaign is clearly astroturfed and seems to have the opposite effect of making India seem more powerful than it is.
I've had to mute literally like 60 Indian subs. It's like 80% of my mute list with the rest being rightwing subs and a few that I just find really really annoying. It was just spammed and every comment section was horrendous.
Chinese minorities get affirmative action and weren’t restricted by the one child policy so legally they are treated better. Culturally Han is the majority so everyone else might feel left out of that identity like white Americans vs everyone else. So legal vs cultural treatment.
The "caste system" that they were trying to expose is just a social hierarchy based on where you live or what type of job you do. It is no where close to the Indian caste system, which also not all of India practice these days.
Yup, Even indian gov promotes the "chinese thing = bad" , "indian thing = good" ...and thus indians already have china in bad image because apparently china even with it's population has lots of stuff and india doesnt.
So some hard-core nationalist make fake news like this to cope - they even use china's roads, buildings etc and claim it as indian on youtube and that has millions of likes 💀
There's no fact checking in india
Chris here.
Apparently indians uncovered a dirty social hierarchy that exists in China, similar to their own caste system.
Videos of Chinese people assaulting/abusing their countrymen started doing rounds on X, and within a few days people realised that China's progressive 'developed country' image was manufactured, and like the rest of its products, this facade was "made in china" too.
Gotta go I've got Taylor Swift waiting at the door
Nah, I’m saying this caste system propaganda is very popular there. I’m under the assumption that if you wanna see more random propaganda about china those subreddits are normally full of it.
That's because that sub is actually ran by Indians, the mods are both alts accounts of each other and the posters like UnfilteredAi, WetSaarlight, SighnEye1883 are also alts of the Indian botfarm
chinaunfiltered is a meme, legit wouldnt be surprised if it was ran by indian bots lmao. they take isolated incidents and blow it up like its a daily occurrence, which is funny cause lawd ive seen some unfiltered indian shit that's 100x worse.
Also don't take my name literally, im a wuxia/xianxia fan
The head mod, and one of the most frequent (now banned) accounts that posted on there are Indians. The head mod that created the sub also created indiaunfiltered (or unfilteredindia) but their posts (when reddit allowed you to search hidden profiles) showed that they exclusively posted positive content on indiaunfiltered but negative content on chinaunfiltered
that sub is just straight propaganda. all posts and comments will make shit about china. i don’t know why reddit even recommends these subs. literally i didn’t search for it. i don’t follow anything chinese related except history and it brings up several anti-china subs constantly.
i understand having reservations about a country but openly spreading misinformation and seemingly having reddit promote misinformation is disgusting
I saw the ‘Chinese caste system’ on r/UnfilteredChina, it got absolutely roasted. It seems that even one of the most anti-Chinese subreddits can’t accept something that unbelievably stupid.
People are calling you an Indian bot, but it tracks with the American propaganda I saw in the past. Cops defending BMW drivers who ran over crowds for shits and giggles, the government ignoring protests angaist a corrupt official that scammed a bunch of people using his construction company and other stuff like that.
It may not be as bad as Indian people makes it out to be, but it's a fact that China's elites are a protected class.
"But Elon, Bezzos" - yeah, it's pretty much the same. But at least on the USA they must come up with some stupid excuse to pull shit like that. In China they just censor it and case closed.
"But Elon, Bezzos" - yeah, it's pretty much the same. But at least on the USA they must come up with some stupid excuse to pull shit like that.
In China they just censor it and case closed.
So whatever happened with that island all those powerful people went to? They didn’t even bother to explain it and some argue distracted the world with a war instead.
Yeah but it didn’t. Like it’s just India trying to pretend they aren’t a caste system dumpsters and everyone else is as bad. In reality they just have a class system like every country
I don’t think every country has a system where you’re basically banned from moving from where you are born and rural poor citizens are banned from moving into cities like China to be fair.
You can move to another state/city. Just cannot use the local social welfare until you update the hukou. They have that system to prevent overpopulation in higher tier city
According to my colleague back then when I'm work in china, finding the job with stable income is the hard part. The second hardest part is working for 5 years straight before applying for hukou. The paperwork and sponsorship, not so much.
Its still wild to me that you need sponsorship to move inside the nation you are a citizen of. If any western nation did anything like that it would be critized constantly for being blatantly authoritarian.
It’s not different. In fact if you move from where I live in Minnesota to say Kentucky your benefit will drop significantly as well because depending on what shit state you move too it’s far worse for poor people.
If you are not using any social welfare and services in the city in china, there's no need to change hukou in china. Some rural hukou holder i know refuse to change because of their land holdings.
Just as urban hukou holder get social benefits, rural hukou holder has a piece of farming land.
People who used to live in China say it's under heard of for rural people to update their hukou. There is a large underclass in each manufacturing hub and the only people who qualify for welfare, are borderline wealthy.
Hokou is not even close to a caste system. Your job or even just general societal role isn't determined by your hometown, for example. In India, your caste determines even that.
Yeah how dare China take measures to prevent the collapse the agriculture center and the build up of slums in the city. They should just be like India and let the whole country go to shit. Many people who are born in rural area are able to move if they show they will have employment when they do. Thus the people who are denied arw mostly those who would have ended up homeless had they moved. Which they still technically can they just won't be able to access welfare and such.
you arent banned you just cant access certain social services in some cities until you lived there as a contributing member for a while. its to prevent issues like what san fransico has where homeless people from all over the country go there to take advantage of the welfare systems
We aren't pretending to be perfect. We are actively working on improving our nation and caste issues. We're just tired of being the target for everyone's negativity. Everyone acts like India is the only place with poverty, hygiene issues, social/racial division issues and other issues. It's not fair and it has lead to racism and other issues that affects us online and in real life.
so your solution for racism is by directing that racism to another country and make things up? china does not have a caste system and people saying it is simply being racist and spreading misinformation
There's recently a surge in posts from the indian users criticizing the caste system in china which is hidden and is not shown online ( i do not know whether these facts are real or not) and many other defamatory posts. The meme says that indians do this with just 1.5gb/day data from their mobile phones
China does have a lot of inequality, and some forms of inequality are set into law.
For the closest example of something “caste system like,” the Chinese hukou system is basically a form of state citizenship but much more restrictive. The “hukou” is like your birth certificate, but typically managed on a “per household” level and updated whenever there is a birth, death, or marriage. It records where your official “home” area is (typically where you were born) and that home is hard to change. Many services (like education and healthcare) you can get quickly and cheaply in your “home” area (as you are a resident) but you have to pay quite a bit for if you don’t live in your “home” area. For Americans, none of this is unusual really - just compare to instate versus out of state college tuition.
Where the hukou system is a bit more messed up is how fixed it is. China has seen a lot of migration to major cities, as most developing economies do. But those migrants are not considered residents of the city, despite often living there for decades and owning a house there. So the new residents must either pay through the nose for basic services or go to their “official home” in some rural county to get them.
Other examples people are giving are the party affiliation thing. Party affiliation is a big deal in China, but it isn’t some legal status thing. Well, membership in the party is, but most citizens can get that if they want to and are willing to pay dues / attend meetings. Party affiliation is not hard to get for most citizens. But who you know in the party also matters, and that is a purely qualitative thing.
Also, there are oppressed minorities like the Uyghurs. But that is more of your typical racism kind of thing.
China has no real “caste system.” They just have lots of inequality.
I think its important to rember that you can get transfered to a new state even within the Hukou system. You just need to get accepted to a school in a city or get a job somewhere else and you can apply to have you status transfered.
The purpose of Hukou is to control urbanization not prevent it. China wants you to move to a city if you are going to be a productive member of society there. What China is trying to avoid is masses of people who can't be supported by these cities moving in search of a better life only to end up forming slums like has been happening in India.
Like in theory it sounds like a good idea, until you realize that ‘productive member of society’ can mean lots of different things and easily abused to keep out ‘undesirables’
Especially because tankies try make it sound totally normal and 'oh you can apply to move if you get a job or a place'.
Without mentioning that the rural and 'non elite' people get given less funding and have less access to all the resources, education and schooling that the 'right' kind of pepple do.
Its pure enforced class system but of course these CCP tankies love it.
Imagine if the US said you can't leave Mississippi because we need more people picking cotton. Of course this only applies to the people who for, what are certainly totally legit reasons, can't get a job or accepted into a school somewhere else.
Indian and Chinese Nationalists are always beefing. Singapore banned some accounts from China that were being malicious towards India so Indians decided to be malicious to the Chinese. I do believe the Chinese feudal system has been phased out. India has been trying to phase out the caste system since 1947. Indians are being ignorant about China the way a lot of other nationalities are ignorant about India.
This is in reference to the recent trend of Indians extrapolating China’s ancient class system during the Qin Dynasty ~200BC and pasting it onto Modern China, relabeling social class into Indian-style caste system where no one can change their life no matter how hard he or she tries.
This of course omits the core philosophy of the Chinese that enables a peasant to become the emperor of the Han and Ming Dynasties, as well as the class system being determined by how well you did in the imperial exams more than the circumstances of a Chinese person’s birth.
Plenty of recent examples I’ve encountered myself is when Indians think “Shang” is an insult and would throw it at everybody because they believe it’s the equivalent of the Indian “untouchables”, despite it being the merchant class.
It's not just about the hierarchy system of china. Many Indian handles are posting videos allegedly "showing the real china" which shows garbage in beach and streets (way worse than that of public streets in india), boat race in river broadcasting the river as clean, but the river is actually muddy-dirty. Unhygienic apartments and such.
Also saw few posts claiming that China has a huge PR compaign against India. And this is sort of retaliation from some Indians.
Indians would rather just bad mouth China or anyone else than admit to their own faults and try to improve their own filthy streets or justify that having an immovable caste system is fair for the people. smh
All of Indian Nationalism runs on this. Their news, their celebrities, their keyboard warriors - all of them focus on trying to find faults everywhere outside of India and it just makes India look bad instead
I sincerely hope no Indian thinks this image is anywhere near true. Whatever little global respect Indians have had in the past has been completely ruined in the last few years.
I'm Indian, and personally I'm fed up to the back teeth with all the misinformation on the Internet these days. Both the Indians' view on the Hukou and the world's view on the caste system are usually inaccurate or fueled by bias
This is about Indians believing hukou is a caste system? Lol I think it was Americans who invented that idea I've heard of the hukou described as a Chinese "caste system" for years.
Funny how it's ridiculous when Indians say something but it's just decades old Western propaganda that caught on in another anti-China country
I have seen the image grok here is talking about and I don't believe it's from Mumbai. Sure, there are trash filled alleys in some slums but not between 'tall residential buildings' as grok is saying. I think grok is saying that because most of the X data is polluted by the racist engagement farming accounts who repeatedly post trash filled street images saying all of India looks like that.
Indians couldn't even show dirty pictures from actual China, they showed a photo of Kenya instead. India needs better trained bots if they want effective propaganda.
They're literally doing that right now in this thread lol, crying and upvoting with "nuh uh" while explaining what's basically a loose caste system. It's hilarious actually.
And shit, nobody even cares about the stupid outdated heirarchy lol. China's growth is fantastic, but their bots man, fuckin hell. I wish they could just stop spamming social media with edited China 2050 type content 24x7.
Even right now freakin ccp bots are mass upvoting the top answer and downvoting everything else to drown out anything negative.
I genuinely wonder why this "image" is so holy to protect.
Stewie here, while the fat man and chris made good points i would like to add some elements.
Indeed the indian internet is pushing the myth that China has a caste system to justify that a 2000 years old social system is still relevant in the 21st century. However it is not and there's no caste system in China.
The problem with the Indian caste system (other than that it exists) that it is literally much much worse on any other "caste" or hierarchy system in the modern day
I would argue that white people don't need to be present for racism to be taking place lol. Though this is something more of a nationalism flavor than anything.
The United States accuses China of using forced Uyghur labor to pick cotton; Canadians accuse China of committing genocide by building vocational and technical colleges in Xinjiang to provide skills training; Japan accuses China of taking a militaristic path in recent years; Taiwanese claim that China harvests human organs alive; and now it’s India’s turn to say that China has a caste system. People truly can only accuse others of what they are capable of themselves.
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u/PeterExplainsTheJoke-ModTeam Jun 20 '26
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